Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency
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20 “The Federalist No. 9,” in Alexander Hamilton: Writings, Library of America, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (New York: Penguin, 2001), 196–201.
21 Alfred P. Thom, “‘A Right of States’ Which Is Often Overlooked,” Railway Age Gazette 59 (1915), 49.
22 Washington to James Warren, October 7, 1785. Here I have used the wording from the Fitzpatrick edition of The Writings of George Washington because the “shadow” concept holds true. (“In a word, the confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without the substance; and Congress a nugatory body, their ordinances being little attended to.”) The actual text of that sentence reads: “In a word, the Confederation appears to me to be little more than an empty sound, and Congress a nugatory body; the ordinances of it being very little attended to.” See Washington to James Warren, October 7, 1785, in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 3:299.
Chapter 3: The Shadow Government
1 This description is based on portraits created after his death, since “there is no known image of him except for a crude woodcut in the National Portrait Gallery.” “Daniel Shays,” Bringing History to Life: The People of Shays’ Rebellion, Springfield Technical Community College.
2 James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1654 (Northampton: Gazette Printing Company, 1898–1902), 2:491.
3 Gregory Nobles, “Shays and His Neighbors,” in In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Insurrection, ed. Robert Gross (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 185–203.
4 Address from the General Court to the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Adams & Nourse, 1786), 40.
5 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 94.
6 Journals of the Continental Congress, 32:93–95.
7 Hampshire Gazette, September 13, 1786.
8 Marion L. Starkey, A Little Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1955), 101.
9 Petersham Monument (1987), qtd. in “Daniel Shays,” Bringing History to Life: The People of Shays’ Rebellion, Springfield Technical Community College.
10 Washington to David Humphreys, December 26, 1786, in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 4:478.
11 Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786, in ibid., 4:331.
12 Washington to James Warren, October 7, 1785, in ibid., 3:298–301.
13 Washington to John Jay, August 1, 1786, in ibid., 4:212.
14 Washington to James McHenry, August 22, 1785, in ibid., 3:198.
15 Washington to Jay, 4:212.
Chapter 4: The Phoenix
1 Carl Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal: The Story of the Making and Ratifying of the Constitution of the United States (1948; New York: Praeger, 1982), 1.
2 Ibid.
3 Washington to George Steptoe Washington, March 23, 1789, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, 1:438–41.
4 With the exception of Rhode Island, which believed the convention to be illegal.
5 Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 5n6.
6 Bruce Ackerman, “A United States of Europe?” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2011.
7 Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal, 9.
8 For an excellent anecdote regarding the importance Washington placed on punctuality, see Chernow, Washington: A Life, 392–93.
9 Stanley Finger and Ian S. Hagemann, “Benjamin Franklin’s Risk Factors for Gout and Stones: From Genes and Diet to Possible Lead Poisoning,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152 no. 2 (2008): 189.
10 About 75 percent of the delegates had served in the Continental Congress and many had fought in the American Revolution. For short biographical entries for each delegate in the best, most accessible single-volume narrative of the Constitutional Convention, see Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2002), 211–61.
11 William Pierce stated that “there is an impetuosity in his temper that is injurious to him; but there is an honest rectitude about him that makes him a valuable Member of Society.” William Pierce, Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention (1787).
12 Gordon Lloyd, “The Constitutional Convention,” Teaching American History Project, Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University.
13 Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Cyclopedia, ed. John P. Foley (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900), 522.
14 Ibid.
15 Richard C. Box, Public Administration and Society: Critical Issues in American Governance (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 66.
16 Lloyd, “The Constitutional Convention.”
17 On the role of clothing in politics, see Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
18 All except Franklin, who was also world-renowned.
Chapter 5: Wield the Sword
1 R. D. Rotunda, “Original Intent, the View of the Framers, and the Role of the Ratifiers,” Vanderbilt Law Review 41 (1988): 510.
2 Carl Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal (Praeger, 1982), 24.
3 Isaac Weld, Travels Through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2nd ed. (London: John Stockdale, 1799), 104–9.
4 Slaves’ teeth were far less expensive.
5 Ibid.
6 Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal, 24.
7 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3:85.
8 Virginia T. Elverson and Mary Ann McLanahan, Cooking Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975), 14.
9 Ibid.; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, A Biography (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1948–57), 1:104.
10 Barbara Holland, The Joy of Drinking (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 64.
11 Washington to Thomas Green, March 31, 1789, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, 1:467–69.
12 There is some debate regarding whether Franklin was the first person to create bifocals, but he is popularly credited with doing so.
13 Richard C. Box, Public Administration and Society: Critical Issues in American Governance (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 66.
14 Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, qtd. in Norman Kolpas, Practically Useless Information on Food and Drink (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2005), 41.
15 People drank large amounts of alcohol during the eighteenth century because it was often safer than the unclean drinking water available. As a result, they typically had higher tolerances than the average person today.
16 James McHenry, A Report of Committee, December 23, 1783, Answer of Congress to General Washington, in Journals of the Continental Congress, 25:83.
17 See e.g. Outline of U.S. Government, ed. Rosalie Targonski, InfoUSA, U.S. Department of State (2000), 5.
18 Bennet N. Hollander, “The President and Congress: Operational Control of the Armed Forces,” Military Law Review 27 (1955): 49. Hollander notes that the “colonists shared a deep fear of the development under the new government of a military branch unchecked by the legislature and susceptible to use by an arbitrary executive power.”
19 Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791, ed. Edgar S. Maclay, 1st ed. (1890), 10. See also Martin S. Flaherty, “Historical Perspective: More Apparent Than Real: The Revolutionary Commitment to Constitutional Federalism,” Symposium Papers—Federalism in the 21st Century, Kansas Law Review 45 (July 1997): 2125. Flaherty writes, “Constitutionally-minded Americans . . . necessarily abandoned, the dominant English mixed-government conceptions.”
20 Edmund Randolph, June 1, 1787, in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:66.
21 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:86.
22 Ibid., 1:65; see Joh
n C. Yoo, “Foreign Affairs and the Jeffersonian Executive: A Defense,” Minnesota Law Review 89 (2005): 1654.
23 Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 187.
24 The Declaration of Independence, paras. 13–17.
25 For example, Hugh Williamson of South Carolina expressed his fear of the eventual reemergence of a king and “he wished no precaution to be omitted that might postpone the event as long as possible.” James Madison, July 24, 1787, in The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Gaillard Hund and James Brown Scott (Oxford University Press, 1920).
26 “The Federalist No. 69,” in Alexander Hamilton: Writings, Library of America, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (New York: Penguin, 2001), 366–73. Hamilton uses the king as a point of comparison in describing the new commander in chief but is quick to differentiate.
27 Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography, 131.
28 Charles C. Thach, Jr., The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789: A Study in Constitutional History (1969; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 65.
29 The British monarch as well as the state governors.
30 Journal of William Maclay, 248.
31 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: Norton, 1987), 175.
32 The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliot (1836), 3:107.
33 Ibid., 393.
Chapter 6: Supreme Law of the Land
1 In Federalist No. 69, Hamilton indeed states that the Constitution’s commander-in-chief powers are in many respects similar to those of the king of Great Britain and of the governor of New York. However, he signals that this as a simplification and proceeds to ferret out some of the main differences. As the other sources cited in these pages make clear, the Founders and the American people were not trying to duplicate the old system. It was Washington who had most clearly defined the powers of the American commander in chief—recently and right before their eyes.
2 Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 169.
3 Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898), 170.
4 Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention, 334.
5 Pierce Butler to Weedon Butler, May 5, 1778, in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3:302.
6 Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention, 323.
7 Washington to Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, January 9, 1790, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, 4:552.
8 They also feared Congress and the new judicial branch, but this book primarily focuses on the executive.
9 James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, July 12, 1788, in The Writings of James Monroe, ed. Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 1:186. Monroe was speaking of the Virginia Convention in particular but the sentiment certainly holds true for the rest of the country, where Washington was also beloved.
10 Declaration of Independence.
Part II: Cruel and Usual Punishment
1 Washington to John Hancock, President of Continental Congress, July 15, 1776, in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, 5:325.
2 “The American Revolution and the Post-Revolutionary Era: A Historical Legacy,” ch. 1 in A Counterintelligence Reader, vol. 1, American Revolution to World War II, ed. Frank J. Rafalko (National Counterintelligence Center), 8.
3 John Bakeless, Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), 13.
4 John Warren to John Adams, October 1, 1775, qtd. in ibid., 15.
5 Ibid., 12.
6 Washington to John Hancock, October 5, 1775, in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, 2:99.
7 Warren to Adams, October 1, 1775, 15.
8 Washington to Hancock, October 5, 1775, 2:99.
9 Robert C. Doyle, The Enemy in Our Hands: America’s Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War, from the Revolution to the War on Terror (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 12.
10 According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “torture” means 1. “to cause intense suffering to” or 2. “to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain.” In modern political dialogue, we often refer to torture as a means of extracting information from an uncooperative enemy combatant. In these chapters, the term “torture” refers to the dictionary definition and does not necessarily connote a singular desire to obtain information from the prisoner. The Founders used torture more to halt the British atrocities against American prisoners than as a means of extracting intelligence. But in a sense, the overall goal likewise was to save American lives.
Chapter 7: The Currents of War
1 The Americans used the Anglophone definition of private property, derived from Locke, which asserted that a man who improved previously unused land—whether by cultivating it, building on it, etc.—had a legitimate claim of ownership. Thus, all of this land “unimproved” by the Native Americans was considered ripe for the taking.
2 The Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and Townshend Acts are certainly not to be forgotten as contributing factors.
3 Thomas Fleming, “Introduction,” in Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Signet Classics, 2001), vi.
4 Dedham Historical Society, The Dedham Historical Register, 7:132.
5 Connecticut Gazette, September 22, 1775.
6 Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1961), 157.
7 Connecticut Gazette, September 22, 1775.
8 Ibid.
9 Donald Barr Chidsey, The Loyalists: The Story of Those Americans Who Fought Against Independence (New York: Crown, 1973), 38.
10 John D. Steinmetz, “Tarring and Feathering,” in NationMaster Encyclopedia.
11 Estimated Times/Temperatures Causing a Full Thickness (third degree) Burn, National Burn Victim Foundation, qtd. in “In the Matter of Bonnie Johnson,” Could This Happen?, at http://www.cqc.ny.gov.
12 Terry M. Mays, Historical Dictionary of Revolutionary America (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 276.
13 Connecticut Gazette, September 22, 1775.
14 Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution (1926), 1:298.
15 David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 190.
16 Estimates of the number of militiamen and redcoats vary; this figure is based on the deposition of British officer Edward Gould, April 25, 1775. There is an in-depth discussion of this question in Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 400nn18–20.
17 Reverend William Gordon of Roxbury to a gentleman in England, May 17, 1775, in The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 80.
18 Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 190.
19 There are conflicting accounts of what transpired, and each side blamed the other for the initial shot. It is very possible that there were multiple shots from both sides. This is based on the reports of British officers Major John Pitcairn and Lieutenant Will Sutherland. Major John Pitcairn to General Gage, April 25, 1775. David Hackett Fischer provides a good discussion in Paul Revere’s Ride, 193–94. Many thanks to David Hackett Fischer for his writings and help. His research was very helpful in writing this book.
20 The Americans were armed with muskets, blunderbusses, or any gun they could find. Exactly who fired the first shot and with what kind of firearm has been lost to history, but many suspect that it was an American with a Scottish flintlock pistol.
21 Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 193.
22 Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 121.
23 Doyle, The Enemy in Our Hands, 36.
24 A journal in London in 1776 stated, “It is whispered that the ministry are endeavoring to fix a certainty which party fired first at Lexington, before hostilities commenced, as the Congress declare, if it can be proved that American blood was first shed, it will go a great way toward ef
fecting a reconciliation on the most honorable terms.” “Who fired the first shot in the American Revolution?” Benson John Lossing, Our Country: Household History for All Readers, 2 (1877), 780.
Chapter 8: Exitus Acta Probat
1 Washington to Charles Lawrence, April 26, 1763, in The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, 7:201.
2 Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington (1898), 38.
3 The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, ed. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, 97–98, as qtd. in Chernow, Washington: A Life, 185. Washington was noted as a great dancer.
4 Benjamin Rush to Thomas Rushton, October 29, 1775, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1951), 92.
5 Journals of the Continental Congress, 1:101. Emphasis added.
6 Ibid.
7 As was typical in eighteenth-century warfare.
8 J. H. Benton, Jr., Early Census Making in Massachusetts: 1643–1765 (1905), 72–73 (listing population as 15,570 in 1765); Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston (1851), 235.
9 John Wilkes, The North Briton (1769), lxvi.
10 Washington to Bryan Fairfax, July 20, 1774, in The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, 10:130.
11 Declaration of Independence.
12 Stanley Ayling, George the Third (New York: Knopf, 1972), 54.
13 King George III is believed to have had the genetic disease porphyria, which may have been exacerbated by arsenic from medications or the products used on his hair. T. M. Cox, N. Jack, S. Lofthouse, J. Watling, J. Haines, M. J. Warren (2005), “King George III and Porphyria: An Elemental Hypothesis and Investigation,” Lancet 366 (2005): 332–35.